Difference between Blogs and News Groups - GeeksforGeeks (2024)

Internet is a global network comprised of smaller networks that are interconnected using standardized communication protocols. It provides a variety of information and communication facilities; contains forums, databases, email, hypertext, etc. In this, articles will learn about what are exactly blogs and newsgroups, the difference between blogs and newsgroups.

Blogs

The blog is an informational published website on WWW (World Wide Web) consisting of diary-style entries. Or we can say that a blog is like a personal diary or a journal present on the website. It can be run by a single person or by a group of people to update information. It is used to share information, ideas, education, and talent. It consisting of entries that are appearing in reverse chronological order which is called posts. Blogs are created by using some specific publishing software such as google blogger, etc. In blogs, typically engrossed in a specific author’s voice that is related to interest to the author. Most of the time, we follow such blogs which are interested in a particular author’s point of view. Most of the blogs provide commentary on particular topics such as religion, politics, sports, and arts to science. The person who used to write blogs is called a blogger. Blogs can be private or public, it totally depends upon the blogger.

Purpose of Blogs

The uses of blogs are almost limitless. Because we can not provide functionality like website in blogs like a login feature and other authentication function. It can be used for communicating and publishing information on the Internet. Teaching, Writing articles on various topics are the common uses of blogs. It gives way to write articles everyday search terms. Our blog gives content to others to think and write on it. It provides trust and credibility with your audience. Sometimes it attracts websites visitors and the number of clicks increases the search result.

Why blogging is popular?

To start blogging, we don’t need any kind of technical knowledge, any coding language, or a programming approach. We can start blogging, without any past web designing skills. If you are not good at grammar, you can use the spell checker and other plugins to check your grammar mistake. Here are various themes available to building your blog page no need to worry about this process. Blogging is absolutely free, you don’t need to pay anything to start blogging. It is a very good medium to promoting yourself. If you are an artist, graphics designer, photographer, you can show your skill on this platform.

Difference Between Blogs and website

A blog is also a website. We can say that it is a type of website or blog that is a subset of a website. Blogs are frequently updated whereas websites are more static and organized into pages and blogs are organized into posts. Blogs provide information to users where websites provide information as well as some functionality also. The nature of blogs is informal and informative whereas websites are formal and professional. Post is the basic unit of blog and content is the basic unit of website. On blogs, there is a feature to subscribe to the RSS feed whereas on websites there is no subscription feature.

Benefits of Blogging

Some of the benefits of blogging are:

• It provides you an opportunity to organize your ideas and thoughts.
• It is a platform where you can showcase your ideas, skills, etc. to other people.
• Earn money from blogging.
• Big and small companies use blogging to bring more customers to their websites.
• You can also start a business using a blog.
• You can also sell products on your bog.

News Group

A newsgroup is a collaboration about a particular subject. It’s organized into subject hierarchies, with title, subtitle, and description. It starts when we post a question or comment on the internet as other start to reply to the post which keeps growing as several people answer it. It’s the best way to share our views on any topic according to our interests. Eweka, New hosting, Easynews, Tweaknews, and Giganews are examples of newsgroups. A newsgroup discussion was redistributed through USENET, a WWW (World Wide Web) network of the news discussion groups. It uses the NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol).

Types of newsgroups

Generally, newsgroups are of two types:

• Moderated Newsgroups: This type of newsgroup is designed to discuss a designated person who decides which postings should be allowed or removed. In this type of group, we can not post directly. Out will be sent to the moderator of the newsgroup for approval. Once it is approved post will be published.
• Unmoderated Newsgroups: In this type of newsgroup, everyone is free to post and comment. No one is can remove comments and posts. Our posts do not need approval. It will be published on the newsgroup without a moderator.

Hierarchies

Newsgroups are generally arranged in hierarchies so that it is easier to find the related groups. The commonly used hierarchies are known as unset hierarchies.For example, rec.arts.sf.callofduty.games, here, rec.* is the top level hierarchy and asterisk(*) is the wildcard character. The top-level hierarchy is a hierarchy defined by the prefix before the first dot. Some commonly used hierarchies are:

• comp.*:- It represents the discussion of computer-related topics
• news.*:- It represents the discussion of Usenet itself
• sci.*:- It represents the discussion of scientific subjects
• rec.*:- It represents the discussion of recreational activities (e.g. games and hobbies)
• soc.*:- It represents the socializing and discussion of social issues.
• talk.*:- It represents the discussion of contentious issues such as religion and politics.
• misc.*:- It represents the miscellaneous discussion – anything which does not fit in the other hierarchies.
• alt.*:- It represents controversial or unusual topics
• biz.*:- It represents the discussion of business.

Here, comp.*, news.*, sci.*, rec.*, soc.*, talk.*, and misc.* hierarchies are known as Big 7.

Benefits of Newsgroup

Some of the benefits of newsgroups are:

• In newsgroups, people can easily join and leave discussions.
• It generally has a FAQ document.
• Data of newsgroups are stored on servers.
• The news on the newsgroups are not email-based, so there are no unwanted and redundant emails.

Difference Between Blogs and Newsgroup